Choreographic Revival, Elite Nationalism, and Postcolonial Appropriation in Senegal
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Choreographic Revival, Elite Nationalism, and Postcolonial Appropriation in Senegal Oxford Handbooks Online Choreographic Revival, Elite Nationalism, and Postcolonial Appropriation in Senegal Hélène Neveu Kringelbach Subject: Music, Ethnomusicology Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765034.013.029 Abstract and Keywords This essay examines the uses of revival performance in the politics of nationalism and regionalism in postcolonial Senegal. In the 1960s, President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s regime chose to foster the performing arts as an essential component in nation-building. This was in continuity with French colonial policy, in which educated young men had been encouraged to create a genre of school musical theater drawing on modern European theater, choreography, and regional traditions centered on the performance of historical epics. The National Ballet created in 1961 thus attempted to revive selective aspects of the region’s history to legitimize the politics of the present. The essay then shows how, when the state lost its capacity to act as an exclusive patron of the arts in the 1980s, urban migrants from regions at the margins of the nation, such as the Casamance, appropriated the genre for their own regionalist and transnational agendas. Keywords: Senegal, Casamance, nationalism, regionalism, National Ballet, musical theatre, choreographic revival, Léopold Sédar Senghor In the late 1930s, in the small town of Sébikotane in Senegal, the students who had come from all over francophone West Africa to the William Ponty School to be trained as schoolteachers and colonial administrators prepared for the holidays with a task: they had to go back to their “villages” and research their cultural “traditions.” The following school year, they would have to stage plays to illustrate the stories they had been told. One of these students was a young man from Guinea, Fodéba Keita, who showed talent for music, drama and poetry. By 1957, Keita was the artistic director of one of Africa’s first professional dance troupes, the Ballets Africains. Soon to become the national dance troupe of independent Guinea, Keita’s Ballets toured the world with musical plays consciously created to revive the memory of pre-colonial Senegambia. Following tremendous success in Paris in the early 1950s, the troupe was invited on a West Africa tour in 1956–57, the high point of which was a series of performances in Dakar. The Dakarois shows made a deep impression on the political and artistic elite of late colonial Senegal, and were to have a major impact on the emergence of a regional genre of revival musical theatre best described as “neo-traditional” performance. More than half a century later, the hundreds of dance troupes that have flourished in Dakar and other Senegalese cities continue to draw inspiration from the Ballets Africains and its codification of selected ceremonial practices from across the region. These practices, dances and rhythms in particular, are marketed as a corpus of “traditions” echoing the memory of a glorified pre-colonial past. Though historical research seldom enters the creative process, the invocation of tradition legitimizes what these troupes do. This is a legacy of a time when, following Senegal’s independence in 1960, President Léopold Sédar Senghor (hereafter “Sédar Senghor”) and the intellectual elite in his entourage created a discourse on tradition to help establish their power both at home and abroad. In the early twenty-first century, choreographers and experienced performers continue to compete for the most authentic historical knowledge or the best training in proper traditional rhythms. The neo-traditional choreographic genre, however, draws on West African musical theatre as it was performed across West Africa, Europe and the United States between the mid-1930s and the late 1960s. Was this a revival movement? Who revived what, and what did the movement achieve? Drawing on the Senegalese case, in this essay I suggest that the revival of performance (dance, music, drama) was particularly powerful as a medium through which post-colonial elites sought to legitimize their power, and imagine a future for the new nation. This was done in large part by creating the illusion of continuity between the pre-colonial past and the present. Indeed, the ways in which post-colonial regimes have sought to establish their power by assuming control over a dominant version of history is well documented (Appadurai 1986; Diouf 1992), but less well documented is the role played by musical and choreographic theatre in creating seductive versions of history. Revival, however, is never static, and as (Livingston 1999:74) points out, “many revivalists [ … ] change their stance over time.” It is not just that revivalists change, it is also that the way in which revival movements develop often slips out of the control of those who promoted it in the first place. From an anthropological perspective, it is precisely the way in which different forms of power shift over time that matters. Studies of revival or revitalization movements have had a tendency to focus on a single historical moment or a group of individuals. Yet the gradual transformation of revival as its patrons “changed their stance,” or as new generations enter the scene, is equally important. But is it appropriate to speak of “revival” in this context? The term is not commonly used in studies of dance, even though many dance forms have been promoted as the conscious revivals of past practices1. Yet ethnomusicologists and anthropologists studying revitalization movements have long recognized that such movements always involved the creation of new cultural forms (Wallace 1956). Dance, like music, exemplifies the creation of something new by virtue of the fact that it is different every time it is performed. Changes in the bodies of dancers over time and generations introduce an additional layer of change, and no choreographic element may travel through time in its original form. Choreographic revival projects are therefore illuminating instances of what it means to invoke the past while creating something new. Senegalese neo-traditional performance may be qualified as a “revival” genre because its practitioners consistently invoke an imagined past as a source of inspiration, and describe what they do as a re-staging of “tradition”. PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2013. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: University of Oxford; date: 02 January 2014 Choreographic Revival, Elite Nationalism, and Postcolonial Appropriation in Senegal In the first part of this essay, I look at the development of Senegalese neo-traditional performance in continuity with colonial school theatre, and as element in the politics of nation-building in postcolonial Senegal. In the second part, I move on to the appropriation of the genre by Casamançais migrants as having inadvertently fostered the emergence of a culturalist, separatist discourse in Senegal’s southernmost region. Ultimately, in this essay I argue that revival is best studied diachronically, as a process.2 Musical Theater in Senegambia During the Colonial Period In this section, I chart the emergence of the modern theatrical genre that eventually provided an idiom for the construction of a revivalist discourse on the Casamance region. Musical theatre in Senegambia did not begin with French colonization. Modern theater involving drama, music, and choreography largely developed on the basis of already strong performing traditions.3 But it was during the colonial period that elements from these diverse traditions were combined with European theater in a kind of artistic bricolage to form a codified expressive form. As suggested in the introduction, an important turning point was the promotion of theater in colonial schools. Naturally, musical theater was being made outside modern schools, too, as Karin Barber (2000) has shown in brilliant detail with the emergence of traveling popular theater in the Yoruba-speaking parts of Nigeria in the late colonial period. In Senegal, it was the French authorities who made the conscious choice to include theater in the training of African schoolteachers and administrators. Central to this project was the Ecole Normale William Ponty4 mentioned in the introduction, which had been set up in Gorée in 1915 before being moved to Sébikotane, east of Dakar, in 1938. In 1935 Frenchman Charles Béart, who was soon to become director, introduced the writing of plays to the curriculum. The aim was to encourage the students to preserve a connection with rural life. Indeed, while they epitomized the successful évolués5, there was also a fear that they might lose touch with the populations they would have to teach or administer. This was evident in Béart’s writings at the time: Some of the students have asked the Director of the William Ponty School to lend them the costumes made for the [end-of-year] party so that they may “play” during the holidays. Tomorrow, as civil servants, they will meet their village brothers with sympathy, they will study the art forms neglected for so long and they will return them to their rightful place. It will be precious for those of us who care about Africa, because we will know it better; it will be precious for those who will find comfort from the minor worries of the profession in this unselfish and generous activity,—the schoolteacher who will have discovered a new and enchanting legend or who will have transcribed an old epic song will soon forget that he has quarreled with the major’s interpreter. (Béart 1937:14)6 The Ponty training probably exceeded French expectations in producing a local elite of schoolteachers who were close to the populations they worked with. Foucher (2002) says of the growing engagement of schoolteachers in politics after WWII that this was due in part to their coverage of the territory and their good relations with the local populations.